Is This The Direction We Are Heading To?

Headline:

Petty leaders are becoming incapable of supporting civic infrastructure required to maintain, libraries, roads, water systems, public arenas and major educational institutions. Cities and merchants are losing the economic benefit of safe conditions for trade and manufacturing. Intellectual development suffers and money is poured into supporting unpopular wars.

This could be a front page article in any major American newspaper, but it also could have been the lead in a paper during the fall of the Roman Empire. Too often we fail to read or acknowledge history. The line, "Those that fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it", certainly applies to us today. The Roman Empire slowly dissolved into obscurity, because while Rome burned Nero fiddled. This is the line that keeps repeating in my head, but in this case our political leaders fiddle while America is burning.

Both parties are to blame. Neither side has decided to put away their own, and party fortunes to focus on the problems facing America. There are many solutions to the issues we face today and yet all we hear is, petty leaders, with their own agendas, going back and forth and taking us nowhere.

I have listened, as the President's new budget arrived, to the people on the right saying, it is dead on arrival. Why? Is there nothing that we can build on? Oh, that's right, Mitch McConnell's most important item for this session is to make President Obama, a one term President. That is all the Republicans care about, except for retaining the current corrupt tax code. There are some very simple ways to start us forward.

Number one we can throw out the tax code. Go with three brackets and no deductions. No write offs for mortgage interest. No write offs for dependants. No write offs for business purposes. No separate rate for capital gains, this would be treated the same as employment income. Everyone would pay. The poor, the middle class, the rich and the corporations. We would start with rates being a little higher and that would be marked for our debt reduction, by law. Once we pay our debt off we would be saving trillions of dollars in interest. We would then build a surplus for that unknown that would occur unexpectedly, such as a natural disaster. Simple. Why can't it be done? The answer to that is also simple. Our politicians are working for the multi-millionaires and billionaires, instead of the people.

We would also be able to start and rebuilt our infrastructure and promote industries to stay here and build in America. Money would be available for research and development, so we could resume our position as world leader. Education would become a priority, instead of an after thought. Our workers would be able to compete against anyone in the world and win.

On the other end we would have to look at Social Security and Medicare-Medicaid. One solution for SS is to have people pay on all money they make to buoy the SS trust fund. We would be able to delay, when someone could start receiving payments. This would also add to the trust fund. It would not effect those that are close now, but as younger people get older they will wait longer. This would reflect more toward the length of time they will live after retirement.

For Medicare and medicaid, once more I support everyone on a single payer system and Medicare-Medicaid for all would fit that bill. We would eliminate the enormous profits the insurance companies are now enjoying and place that money into the care of people. We would have managed health care that the doctors and patients would oversee, not some executive that wants to maintain his profit margin. We would increase the amount of money flowing into the health care of patients and reduce costs, by allowing hospital and health professionals to spend their time taking care of patients instead of filing paperwork with the insurance companies.

Solution are simple and obtainable. We can either allow our leaders to go the way of the pettiness of the Roman Senate and bureaucrats, or we can demand they start finding solutions. Rome collapsed. What direction will we go in?